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Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Mother of the More Famous Mary – Celia Rees

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

I
always like women who are ‘vilified’. They have usually lived unconventional
lives and have done something, or written something not to the liking of the (male)
establishment. That makes them interesting on two counts: interesting anyway, I like people who break
rather than make the rules, and interesting to me as a writer of historical
fiction. When I’m writing in this genre, girls are my main characters. I make no apologies for this. It is a
conscious decision. Boys and men have enough coverage. I want to broadcast
voices less heard, give life to stories disregarded, unrecorded or forgotten. I search out women who led unusual and often transgressive lives. I’m not looking at the average. I’m looking for what it was possible for women to do. For Witch Child and Sorceress,
it was the ‘Unbridled Spirits’ of the English Revolution, and their sisters in
America who settled the land there, or were captured by Native Americans but
lived to tell their tale as redeemed, or unredeemed, captives. For Pirates! it was those Female Sailors Bold,
Mary Read and Anne Bonny. For Sovay it
was Mary Wollstonecraft. It
annoys me when critics, as they sometimes do, dismiss my books as ‘rollicking
good reads, but not history’. All I can do is give an ironic smile, shrug and
mourn their woeful ignorance of the history of their own sex.

Mary
Wollstonecraft’s life was unconventional in the extreme. She had affairs, she lived with men while still
unmarried, she bore a child out of wedlock, and perhaps most shocking of all, she wrote pamphlets challenging
the views of her male contemporaries. She took on the major thinkers of the
day, both conservative and radical. She wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, as a riposte to
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France. Two years later, she answered Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of
Women, putting the case for the other half of the human race. She even took
the sainted Rousseau to task for his dismissal of women. Burke was a pillar of
the establishment; Tom Paine the leading radical thinker of the day; Rousseau
wrote the Social Contract on which
the American and French Revolutions were based, but Mary Wollstonecraft was determined
to have her say and did not regard her relative youth, her lack of formal
education, or her sex as prohibitions. She demanded to have her opinion heard. She saw it as her right.

‘It
is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them
their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by
reforming themselves to reform the world.’

Mary
Wollstonecraft was arguing for equal rights, for men and women alike. She was the first to make such a radical
claim and her audacity catapulted her to fame. It earned her the title ‘hyena
in petticoats’ but she would not be intimidated or bullied into silence. She
was well before her time. It would take close to a hundred years before men
gained the right to vote, let alone women, but the call she made for equality
would echo down from one century to another, to be taken up by the Pankhursts
and the Suffragettes in Britain and by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The National Woman Suffrage Association in America.
Her voice would not be, could not be silenced.

Her
intellectual daring was matched by her physical courage. At a time when most
people were heading in the opposite direction, she went to Paris at the height
of the Revolution to witness events for herself. She arrived barely a month
before Louis XVI was guillotined and joined a group of expatriates which included the British writer Helen Maria Williams. She fell passionately in love with an
American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny, by him. She stayed in France through the height of the
Revolution, even though foreigners were interdit, subject to arrest and the
threat of the guillotine. Her An
Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in 1794.

She
returned to England in 1795. She continued to travel and to publish. In March 1797,
she married fellow writer and philosopher, William Godwin. She had only a few
months left to live. Being a woman got her in the end. She died in September 1797, a few days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta
failed to come away cleanly and she died in hideous agony as her doctor tore it out of her, piece by piece, thereby introducing the septicaemia which would kill her.

She
described herself as ‘the first of a new genus’. I’m proud to belong to the
same family.

14 comments:

Wince - but what a wonderful trumpet blast of a post, Celia! My daughter's been reading aloud bits of Wollstoncraft's letters from her journey to Norway (on business for Imlay, who had lost a ship), and I'm dying to read them myself.

A wonderful blast, Celia! I am always amazed at Mary's courage and what seerms like utter self-belief. Wherever did she get that from? Followed by the irony of her ending,even though it was shared by many women.

Hooray, Celia! You make me want to woman the barricades...And I think your historicals novels are bloody good rollicking reads - nothing wrong with that! - but would never dismiss them as 'not history'. What a cheek. I know enough history to recognise your research, well hidden in story though it is.

Many cheers for Mary! I once came across a fan letter she wrote early in her writing career to her own heroine, the historian Catherine Macaulay (who suffered her own share of vitriol), declaring her profound respect for her as a woman who "contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers...." All very inspiring.

I'm glad Mary struck a chord with the History Girls and our blog readers. An amazing woman whose life and work deserve to be celebrated. She is, indeed, the mother of Mary Shelley, nee Godwin. I'm sure she would have been proud of her daughter, if she had lived to see her grow up. Her tragic, early death was the fate of many, many women, as Penny so rightly points out. Death in child birth was a great leveller. It is one of the reasons I would not want to live in any time but our own (as a woman, that is).

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